The
unhinged arguments at the heart of the 2016 presidential election are
not really a debate about the outgoing president. They’re about Bush’s
legacy

It’s George W Bush’s world, and we’re just living in it.

Not
Donald Trump’s. Not Hillary Clinton’s. Not even Barack Obama’s. No, the
unhinged arguments at the heart of the 2016 presidential election are
not really a debate about the legacy of the current occupant of the
White House. They’re not about Obamacare, or the Recovery Act; the Paris
climate agreement or even the Iran nuclear deal.

They are, at
their heart, an unresolved argument about the world as the 43rd
president defined it: for worse, for much worse, and then for better.

If
you’re the kind of person – on the left or right – who cannot hear the
name George W Bush without foaming at the mouth, you should leave your
comment or post your tweet right now. Because it’s time to take a sober
look at a presidency bookended by the spectacular mass murder on 11
September 2001, and the spectacular financial meltdown of 2008.

From
the rise of Isis to mass surveillance; from tax cuts for the wealthy to
immigration reform; from the excesses of Wall Street to the struggles
of Main Street; this election is taking place in a country that is still
torn apart by the Bush years.

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s hyperkinetic first chief of staff, liked to say
that President Bush had left them a ribbon-wrapped gift of a shit
sandwich: two wars, the worst recession in living memory and a
disastrous international reputation.

But Bush also left them a
path out from his own colossal disasters: the massive government bailout
of the financial sector, and a Federal Reserve prepared to take
unprecedented measures to bankroll the global economy. A drone war to
kill terrorist targets without boots on the ground, and a more stable
Iraq that could allow for a US withdrawal.

While Obama got to work
on his special sandwich, Bush’s Republican party is still stuck in the
middle of it all. For the GOP can no more find its way out of the Bush
debates than Britain’s Labour party can decide how to deal with the
legacy of Tony Blair.

It
took Andy Murray to point out to John Inverdale that the Williams
sisters had beaten his Olympic record – not the only instance in which
women are absent

It has famously been said
that feminism is the radical notion that women are people. While this
distinction may seem obvious, it remains a confusing area for some – not
least sports reporter John Inverdale. Congratulating Andy Murray on his second tennis Olympic gold medal, Inverdale told him:
“You’re the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals,”
leaving Murray to point out: “Venus and Serena [Williams] have won about
four each.”

Just days earlier, while commenting on the men’s rugby sevens event, Inverdale reportedly announced that the winning team would be taking home the first-ever Olympic medal for the sport, despite the women’s title having already been claimed by Australia
less than a week before. All this has led to the mystery of the week,
the question on everybody’s lips: has Inverdale forgotten that women
exist, or does he just not realise that they are people?

In fairness to Inverdale, he is far from alone. Women
have a pesky habit of slipping minds at important moments – just ask
those reporters who discussed our hypothetical new prime minister using
“he” and “him” before being left red-faced by Theresa May’s victory.

It’s
not surprising that Murray picked up on the error – it’s only three
years since he was lavishly congratulated on the front pages for ending
the “77-year wait” for a British Wimbledon champion. Which is true. As long as you don’t consider Virginia Wade, who won Wimbledon in 1977, and three previous female winners since Fred Perry’s 1936 victory, to be people.

It
is telling that we are so used to such omissions that Murray’s simple
statement of fact about the Williams sisters has received rapturous
applause across the media and the internet. Under the circumstances, it
is remarkable and hugely welcome to see a man in his position be so
thoughtful as to acknowledge women’s existence. But wouldn’t it be nice
if it was the norm rather than the exception?

The
same shock manifests itself when subjects deviate from other expected
norms, too, as swimmer Simone Manuel discovered when her gold medal
victory was reduced in headlines to: “Michael Phelps shares historic night with African-American”.
The implication is that white men are individuals – human beings in
their own right, with personalities and quirks and rich, rounded lives –
while other people are still defined as members of homogenous “othered”
groups.

This matters beyond the technicality of who gets named in
a headline. It impacts on how sympathetic our society is likely to be
towards those described. It contributes to the stereotyping and
vilification of entire groups who are tarred, sweepingly, with a single
brush. It writes out of history those whose contributions we most need
to highlight in order to rectify inequality in sport, science and other
fields.

Trump is swaying millions with his calculated rhetoric.

Responsible
reporters in the media normally transcribe political speeches so that
they can accurately report them. But Donald Trump’s discourse style has
stumped a number of reporters. Dan Libit, CNBC’s excellent analyst, is
one of them. Libit writes, "His unscripted speaking style, with its
spasmodic, self-interrupting sentence structure, has increasingly come
to overwhelm the human brains and tape recorders attempting to quote
him."

Given
how dramatically recent polls have turned on his controversial public
utterances, it is not hyperbolic to say that the very fate of the nation
appears destined to come down to one man's application of the English
language, and the public's comprehension of it. It has turned the rote
job of transcribing into a high-stakes calling.

Trump's crimes
against clarity are multifarious: He often speaks in long, run-on
sentences, with frequent asides. He pauses after subordinate clauses. He
frequently quotes people saying things that aren't actual quotes. And
he repeats words and phrases, sometimes with slight variations, in the
same sentence.

Some in the media (Washington Post,Salon,
Slate, Think Progress, etc.) have called Trump’s speeches “word salad.”
Some commentators have even attributed his language use to “early
Alzheimer’s," citing “erratic behavior” and “little regards for social
conventions.”

I don’t believe it.

I have been repeatedly
asked in media interviews about Trumps use of language. So far as I can
tell, he is simply using effective discourse mechanisms to communicate
what he wants to communicate to his audience. I have found that he is
very careful and very strategic in his use of language. The only way I
know to show this is to function as a linguist and cognitive scientist
and go through details.

Let’s start with sentence fragments. It is
common and natural in New York discourse for friends to finish one
another’s sentences. And throughout the country, if you don't actually
say the rest of a friend’s sentence out loud, there is nevertheless a
point at which you can finish it in your head. When this happens in
cooperative discourse, it can show empathy and intimacy with a friend,
that you know the context of the narrative, and that you understand and
accept your friend’s framing of the situation so well you can even
finish what they have started to say. Of course, you can be bored with,
or antagonistic to someone and be able to finish their sentences with
anything but a feeling of empathy and intimacy. But Trump prefers to
talk to a friendly crowd.

Years of blaming feminists for a supposed "demographic winter" fuel Trump's demonization of Merkel and Clinton

Donald Trump has a new obsession: comparing Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. During a Monday speech,
Trump denounced the “massive immigration” to Germany under Merkel, for
which he blames crime rising “to levels that no one thought would they
would ever see.” He followed up this speech with press releases and a hashtag aimed at equating Clinton and Merkel.

The
choice is an odd one on its surface because most Americans don’t have
an opinion about Merkel, even when they know who she is. But as Alice Ollstein of Think Progress persuasively argued on
Wednesday, the meme makes more sense when one considers that white
supremacists definitely know who Merkel is, because they hate her:

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump,
Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the
White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister
have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” an “anti-White traitor,” and “a patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked, in articles about Merkel, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

It’s yet another example of how Trump is mainstreaming white supremacist sentiment. But
by making two women the center of an attack, he is also highlighting
the way that antifeminism and white supremacy are tied into each other,
since people in alt-right, white supremacist circles like to blame
feminism for what they see as the “decline” of the white race.

Trump
alone cannot be blamed for the mainstreaming of this ideology. For
years now, mainstream conservative figures have been playing footsy with
the antifeminist, racist fringe, cleaning up its ideas and passing them
off as mainstream conservative thought. Trump’s elevation to nominee of
the Republican Party is just the logical conclusion of these efforts.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Every one knows that when it comes to the economy, Republicans suck
big time. They plunge us in to a depression or near depression every
time they get in power. The only Republican that didn't destroy the
economy was Eisenhower and we had very high taxes on the rich in the
1950s.From The Guardian UK:https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/11/us-economy-recession-republicans-hillary-clinton-policyJana KasperkevicThursday 11 August 2016The
US’s slow recovery from the 2008 recession is due to Republican
policies on the local, state and federal level, according to a new study
published by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI).The
new report comes as the slow pace of recovery has emerged as a key
battleground between Republican candidate Donald Trump and his
Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who will set out her economic policy on Thursday.

The
EPI report blames the lackluster pace of recovery on Republican-led
budget cuts in 2011 following the row over the US debt ceiling, the
unwillingness of local officials to spend money when Republicans in Congress were advocating cuts in spending, and the refusal to expand Medicaid in 19 states.

The
report comes as the Republican party once again calls for the reining
in of government spending and reductions in the deficit.

“Given
the degree of damage inflicted by the Great Recession and the restricted
ability of monetary policy to aid recovery, historically expansionary
fiscal policy was required to return the US economy to full health,” writes Josh Bivens, research and policy director at EPI.

“But
this government spending not only failed to rise fast enough to spur a
rapid recovery, it outright contracted, and this policy choice fully
explains why the economy is only partially recovered from the Great
Recession a full seven years after its official end.”

This
economic recovery has been the slowest over the past four business
cycles. For example, the employment recovery from the trough of the
Great Recession to its pre-recession peak took 51 months. Following the
recession in the 1980s, employment recovery took 11 months. In the early
1990s it took 23 months, and in the early 2000s it took 39 months.

The
US government would have had to spend an additional $1tn in 2015 alone
to match the spending that followed the 1980s recession, Bivens said.
While such spending might run up the US deficit – something Republicans
in Congress are opposed to – it would also have led to “several years of
full employment” and the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates.

How would
people react to the leaders of a religion of eliminating illicit
fornication by amputating all men's penises? I imagine the outrage
would be total, at least on the part of men and there would calls to
wipe that religion from the face of the earth.

A
senior Muslim cleric in Russia has prompted controversy by urging
universal female genital mutilation after a rights group released a
report on the practice in the country’s North Caucasus region.

Mufti
Ismail Berdiyev, who heads a Muslim association for the North Caucasus
region, said Wednesday that if FGM “could be applied to all women, that
would be very good” in an interview with Interfax news agency.

The practice, which ranges from pricking of the clitoris to its complete removal, causes infections and loss of sensation.

The
procedure has come under massive international scrutiny in recent
years, with UN chief Ban Ki-Moon in 2014 launching a global campaign to
end it.

Berdiyev, who was decorated by President Vladimir Putin in
March, said FGM does not stop women from fulfilling their ordained role
of motherhood and if all women were mutilated, “there would be less
fornication”.

– ‘Compulsory ritual’ –

He later retracted his comments, claiming that he had been joking and Islam does not call for FGM.A
controversial Russian Orthodox cleric and blogger, the Church’s former
spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin, backed Berdiyev saying that Muslims had a
right to a “time-honoured tradition”.

“You probably don’t need to
‘circumcise’ all women, there’s no need with Orthodox women as they
don’t fornicate anyway,” he added.

Speaking on the economy, Hillary Clinton eased the concerns of progressive activists and lit into Donald Trump

Heading into Hillary Clintons’ big economic speech on Thursday, there was some concern among progressive groups
that the Democratic presidential nominee was going to use the
opportunity to nudge her policy agenda towards the center. She’d secured
the nomination and no longer had to worry about Bernie Sanders’
challenge from the left, and her campaign was in the middle of a
high-profile push to recruit Republican defectors away from GOP nominee
Donald Trump, which left open the possibility that she might start
moderating for the general election.

Well,
Hillary’s speech seems to have put those concerns to rest. At least for
the moment. She also put together an effective line of attack against
Trump’s economic agenda, separating his populist rhetoric from the
reality of his policy proposals.

Clinton hit a number of
progressive themes and issues during her remarks in Warren, Michigan:
she called for a large boost in infrastructure spending and the creation
of an infrastructure bank,
she committed to connecting every household in the country to broadband
internet by the end of her first term, she offered a strong defense of
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she backed tuition-free
college for everyone except the wealthy.

Perhaps most importantly,
she offered an unequivocal statement of opposition regarding the
Trans-Pacific Partnership. “I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs
or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” she said.
“I oppose it now. I’ll oppose it after the election. And I’ll oppose it
as president.”

This is the stuff that activists want to hear, and
the progressive groups that were slightly wary of Clinton heading into
the speech were pretty ebullient over Hillary’s TPP remarks. “These were
Hillary Clinton’s strongest words yet against the TPP,” Progressive
Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green said in a statement.
“For the first time, Clinton signaled she will personally work to kill
the corporate-written TPP if it comes up after the election in an
unaccountable lame-duck Congress.” The Roosevelt Institute also lauded
Clinton’s speech in a statement released in conjunction with Democracy
Corps: “With this economic speech, Secretary Clinton has made this
election a choice about whether our economy works for all, not just the
few, and that allows progressive economics to win a mandate in
November.”

Both the group’s name, “Trump Youth,” and its rhetoric evokes the Hitler Youth, a wing of Germany’s Nazi party.

In a video posted to the “Trump Youth” website,
the group’s blond leader speaks of having to fight a worldwide
“parasite” enemy, which he later identifies as “globalists.” Nazi
propaganda likened Jews to parasites and condemned them for their
perceived lack of loyalty to their “host” countries.“Our nations
have been commandeered international criminal cartel and this parasite
is feeding on our energy. It’s in Japan, it’s in China, it’s in Germany,
it’s in America — now, if we don’t throw this parasite off our backs,
the world will fall into chaos,” group leader Jayme Liardi said in the
video message.

Liardi’s videos also have a jumpy, rambling
quality: He also criticizes “fluoride in the water” and “GMOs.” But one
of his video has had 20,000 views.

“There will be no peace, if
they are successful, if the globalists are successful, if this new world
order comes to place,” Liardi said. “It’s up to us, the millennials,
the children of tomorrow, to become the hero generation and to save the
world.”

The “Trump Youth” website encourages prospective members
to include their ethnicity in their applications in addition to other
things, such as their biggest accomplishments and how many members they
can refer.

The site does not reference the Republican presidential nominee other than in its name.

On his personal website, Liardi implies Hitler and Nazism have been unfairly portrayed through history.

“I wanted to understand the mind of the supposed most evil man in history,” Liardi wrote.
“And yes, I read Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’. I quickly realized that I
was not being given all of the facts — that what passes for history is
merely rehashed propaganda from the war.”

Liardi also seems to
draw a link between Jewish and globalist interests, referring to the
government supporting globalism as “kosher.”

“If you have no
identity, one will be installed into you by the kosher forces of The
State. Make no mistake, they may say that they are for
‘multiculturalism’ ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ but their actions would
say otherwise. This is the ideology that brought us colonialism, slavery
and the chain stores of suburbia. This is our current world—the world
of Globalism,” Liardi wrote.

In
one series, my groceries are being packed into plastic bags, as I’d
forgotten to bring cloth ones. In other shots, I am getting in and out
of … cars. There are video snippets of me giving talks, or standing on
the street. Sometimes I see the cameraman, sometimes I don’t. The images
are often posted to Twitter, reminders that I’m being watched.

In April, Politico and The Hill reported that America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican opposition research group America Rising, had decided to go after me and Tom Steyer,
another prominent environmentalist, with a campaign on a scale
previously reserved for presidential candidates. Using what The Hill
called “an unprecedented amount of effort and money,” the group, its
executive director said, was seeking to demonstrate our “epic hypocrisy
and extreme positions.”

Since then, my days in public have often
involved cameramen walking backward and videotaping my every move. It’s
mostly when I travel (I’ve encountered them in at least five states so
far, as well as in Australia), and generally when I’m in a public or
semipublic space. They aren’t interested in my arguments; instead, these
videos, usually wordless, are simply posted on Twitter, almost always
with music. One showed me sitting in a church pew, accompanied by the
song “Show Me That Smile.” The tweet read, “Ready for his close-up.”

Someone
also went to the archive at Texas Tech University, where my papers are
stored, and asked for copies of everything in all 54 boxes. He
identified himself as being with a group that is affiliated with America
Rising Squared.

This effort has resulted in all kinds of odd
things appearing on right-wing corners of the web: out-of-context
quotations from old books and articles apparently put on display to
prove I’m a zealot, and photos from God knows who intended to make me
out as a hypocrite (the plastic bags, for instance, and my travel by
car, which, you know, burns gas). Mostly, they’ve just published those
creepy videos, to remind me that I’m under surveillance.

I
understand that this isn’t horrible in the way that police brutality is
horrible, or having your home swept away by a flood is horrible. I know
that in other parts of the world, environmentalists have worse things
than cameras pointed at them. From Honduras to the Philippines, in the last two years, activists have been assassinated after getting in the way of mega projects.

Women are taking home medals, but many reports still focus on them as wives and moms

Mary Elizabeth WilliamsMonday, Aug 8, 2016

Did
you hear that women’s trap shooter Corey Cogdell-Unrein won her second
career Olympic medal for the U.S. team in Rio this weekend? Did you
cheer for Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszú, who won the gold and broke a
world record in 400-meter individual medley? Or were you too distracted
by the media commentary about their husbands?

In
the field of world-class competition, you can be literally one of the
greatest athletes of all time and still have fans who’d argue your
achievements are second-rate. If you want to get on the cover of Sports
Illustrated, your odds are better if you’re a swimsuit model than an actual record-crushing hero. And
then there’s the way that female athletes are repeatedly commented on
in the media — either as objects of desire or grudging “plays like a
guy” admiration, and always, the need to comment on their status as
wives and moms.

When Corey Cogdell-Unrein took the trap shooting
bronze over the weekend, eight years after earning her first medal in
Beijing and four years after competing in London, the headlines noted
her achievement by placing her in context. The Chicago Sun-Times
announced, “Corey Cogdell-Unrein, wife of Bears DE Mitch, wins bronze.”
This is the entire second paragraph of the report:
“Her husband, Bears defensive end Mitch Unrein, cheered her from his
home near Chicago. They have been married for two years.” Last month, the paper similarly declared that “Bears lineman Mitch Unrein’s wife takes aim at gold in Rio.” The Sporting News, meanwhile, reported that “Corey Cogdell, wife of Bears lineman, wins bronze in shooting.”

Writing for Australia’s SBS, comedian Rebecca Shaw suggested
that come the fall, maybe the headlines could announce that “Three time
Olympian Corey Cogdell’s husband plays a game of football.” And on
Twitter, performance artist Mallory Hanora noted
the Chicago Tribune’s tweet on the medal didn’t even mention
Cogdell-Unrein’s name — but did include her husband’s — with a wry, “Wow
she trained so her whole life for that marriage congratulations unnamed
woman.”

Sure, he’s a Chicago athlete and she’s not — note how her home state didn’t have trouble writing the news
as “Alaska trapshooter Cogdell-Unrein claims 2nd Olympic bronze medal.”
And yes, the Bears have a bigger fan community than Olympic trap
shooting does. But did anybody stop for a second before writing that
headline to ask if the story here really is about this woman’s identity
as a wife? (It is not.)

It’s kind of like how when Hillary Clinton
achieved her history-making Democratic nomination for the president of
the U.S., newspapers across the country blasted out photographs of her husband. Know when not to perpetuate BS, journalists.

Thanks
to Bernie Sanders, leftwingers of my generation are poised to wield
enormous influence over national politics. Let’s not use it to excuse
Russia

The idea that Russia is meddling in the US elections on behalf of Donald Trump
– fueled by reports that Russians may have hacked and leaked Democratic
National Committee emails via WikiLeaks – has reignited debates about
US-Russian relations. It has also made apparent the American left’s
failure to articulate a coherent approach to Russia.

No one knows what Trump’s exact relationship
with Vladimir Putin or Russian financial interests is – in part because
he refuses to release his tax statements to the public. But Trump isn’t
the only one that has an ambiguous relationship with Russia. The Soviet
Union broke up 25 years ago, but cold war rhetoric continues to
unhelpfully inform how the American left talks about its largest
successor state.

Much of this can be blamed on the hawks in the
Washington foreign policy establishment who are committed to
confrontation with Putin. There are good reasons to believe that the US
should avoid needless belligerence against a nuclear-armed power, and
that proposals to expand Nato into Georgia, to arm Ukraine against
Russian-backed rebels or simply to denounce Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” are ill-advised.

But
that doesn’t excuse the left’s glibness toward the possibility that
Russia is interfering in a US election. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor
and publisher of the Nation, wrote in the Washington Post this week
that Democrats “are on the verge of becoming the Cold War party, with
Trump, ironically, becoming the candidate of détente” and denounced what
she termed “neo-McCarthyism”. There is also Glenn Greenwald, who, after
Trump called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, dismissed the stunned reaction of much of the US media as “such unmitigated bullshit”.

And WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange won’t comment on how his organization acquired the DNC emails, but has pushed back against the notion of Russian involvement, despite the growing consensus among US spy agency officials that they were involved.

But
it’s not just prominent leftwing leaders who are turning a blind eye to
Russia. Some young supporters of Bernie Sanders, who are justifiably
upset about the information revealed by WikiLeaks, told the Daily Beast’s Tim Mak that they don’t care what role Russia might have played.

As
someone who supported Sanders, and who has also spent years closely
observing Russian politics, it was frustrating to watch many of my
friends and allies on the left shrugging off concerns about Russia in my
Twitter feed last week. Nearly a century after the Bolsheviks first
seized power, the American left’s relationship with Russia is still defined by an abstract nostalgia for a failed socialist experiment that has little relevance today.

Notwithstanding
the Kremlin’s protecting of Snowden or its patriotic celebrations of
the communist era, contemporary Russia is in no sense a left-leaning
country.

It is better understood as a cautionary tale of unchecked
neoliberalism. The US-supported 1990s privatization schemes described
in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine are directly responsible for the rise of Putin and the repressive state he presides over.

Instead,
organizers offered up a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas in the service
of creating a new world order, one in which defunding police, releasing
all political prisoners from jail, and redistributing of land are
imperative.

Moreover, apparently believing that societal reforms
in America’s inner cities are somehow related to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, BLM included a section on Israel in its list of demands. With
trite talking points, the group called for a divestment from the Jewish
state as it is allegedly “complicit in the genocide against the
Palestinian people.”

What this means is unpleasant to contemplate.
An organization formed to confront systemic prejudice against black
Americans—which predates the reestablishment of the state of Israel—is
now intimating that such prejudice is caused by the Jewish state’s
supposed genocidal tendencies (which, according to census reports, have
led to a population increase among Palestinians).

Though I find no
intrinsic value in “rebutting” crackpot conspiracy theories, it’s worth
demonstrating how far removed BLM is from honoring the legacy of its
ancestors by reminding readers just how pro-Zionist prominent leaders in
the black community have been throughout history—and how Zionism helped
shape black politics in America.

Edward Wilmot Blyden, founder of
the 19th-century American Pan-African movement, famously wrote,“[I
have] the deepest possible interest in the current history of the
Jews—especially in that marvelous movement called Zionism.”

W.E.B.
Dubois, founder of the NAACP, declared in 1919, “The African movement
must mean to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the
centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial front. …
For any ebullition of effort and feeling that results in an amelioration
of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate the conditions of colored
peoples throughout the world.”

Marcus Garvey, founder of the
Back-to-Africa movement, stated in 1920: “When a Jew says, ‘We shall
have Palestine,’ the same feeling comes to us when we say, ‘We shall
have Africa.’ … Africa remains the heritage of black people, as
Palestine is of the Jews.”

Why,
then, does it feel like any time a woman points out the objectively
important political and cultural moment at hand, someone else feels the
need to jump in to tell her why she’s wrong? I’ve heard it from my
female friends, seen it on social media and experienced it myself: if
you dare to express overwhelm or joy at the prospect of a female
president, or the strides women’s rights have made this year, you are
promptly shot down by a special brand of misogynist killjoy.

They
point out Clinton’s imperfections, or that women have run as third-party
candidates before, to make the case that our happiness is misplaced.
They say it’s not really an important moment. That our feelings are
wrong. As if any celebration needs to be papered over with caveats and
“actuallys”.

But here’s the thing: men, it’s not your moment, and
the irony of lecturing over our happiness at this particular historical
milestone is not lost on us. We have heard this kind of hectoring
before; in fact, we’ve heard it most of our lives. (There is a reason
the term “mansplaining” took off the way it did!)It is not that
we think your opinion is unimportant – we just think that it can wait.
Or that you don’t need to give it at every possible turn, especially if
we’re taking the rare moment that women see progress to breathe a sigh
of happiness. As Michelle Obama pointed out in her epic speech at the DNC, this is bigger than any one person’s “desires or disappointments”.

Trust
me, those who are celebrating the possibility of a female president –
or the fact that the Democratic nominee is a woman – fully understand
that the moment, and the candidate, are not perfect. But name me a
hurdle jumped that is. Instead of talking over women who may be
celebrating, try asking us why we are doing so.

Ask us about what
it feels like to never have seen ourselves represented at the highest
level of government. Ask what it’s like to grow up with people
constantly undervaluing your opinion, or ignoring your intelligence. Ask
us what kind of world we imagine when we take a minute, just a minute,
to consider how political parity might change things.

Your home doesn't need to be picture-perfect to invite people over.

My friends Dana and John perfectly practice what the Rev. Jack King referred to as "scruffy hospitality."
Their kitchen is small. The wood cabinets are dark and a few decades
old. Spices and jars for sugar and flour line the countertops because
there's nowhere else to put them. A tall, round table shoved in a corner
has mismatched bar stools crammed around it.

The sliding glass
doors in the kitchen lead to a back deck with a well-used chiminea, an
outdoor table and a large variety of chairs and cushions, many of them
bought at yard sales. We circle the chairs around the chiminea on
weekend nights during all four seasons, whenever Dana and John put out a
simple call out through text or Facebook that says, "Fire tonight!"

There
will always be food, but like the bar stools and deck chairs, the food
is mismatched. Our hosts provide some food. John may have the urge to
make jalapeño poppers or Dana may put together some version of salsa
with whatever's fresh from the garden, but there's not a formally
prepared meal.

Everyone just brings something. It's perfectly
acceptable, encouraged even, to bring odds and ends of foods that need
to get used up. I often bring wedges of cheese that have already been
cut into or half a baguette to slice up and toast to dip in hummus.
Everyone brings a little something to drink. And it's a glorious feast.

This
kitchen and deck won't be featured in in Better Homes and Gardens
anytime soon, but maybe they should be. They are two of the most
hospitable spaces I know. By opening up their home as-is, Dana and John
are the most gracious hosts I know. I almost wrote "by opening up their
home with its imperfections," but that's not accurate. Their home is
perfect — just like it is.

What is scruffy hospitality?

On his blog, Father Jack defines scruffy hospitality this way:

Scruffy
hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be
in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy
hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a
simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy
hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than
the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with
friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together.

He encourages people not to allow an unfinished to-do list to stop us from opening our homes to friends and family.

I
agree, but here's the problem. It's hard to let go of the belief that
our homes need to be picture-perfect — or maybe I should say
"Pinterest-perfect" — before we can welcome guests. But the idea that we
must make our home look un-lived in before having people over stops so
many of us from sharing life together.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson